After a two-year stint on the Manhattan School of Music, she dropped out and rapidly landed a task in a brand new musical, Turning into Nancy, directed by Jerry Mitchell that premiered in Atlanta in 2019. Following a tour as Gretchen Wieners in Imply Ladies, she was introduced in by Mitchell to audition for Betty within the Chicago try-out of Boop! in 2023. (She had performed a distinct, supporting character in an earlier workshop of the present.)
She was not ready for the tap-heavy choreography concerned in that first audition. “It was horrifying!” A aggressive dancer as a baby, she stopped coaching when she moved to Texas at 11, however figured sufficient of the ability would come again for her to wing it; she was flawed. “It was soul-crushing, I went dwelling and sobbed,” she recollects, the cringe nonetheless seen in her eyes. She didn’t get the half then.
Later that spring, she occurred to be in a rehearsal house in Manhattan, serving to a pal with one other present, when she heard the Boop! music wafting down the hallway. Rogers did some digging and found the manufacturing nonetheless had not forged Betty. She describes pacing round midtown that day, considering what she ought to do earlier than lastly calling her agent. “I used to be like, ‘I don’t know what we have to do, however I have to get again in there.’ I’d by no means performed something like that earlier than.” It labored, and for 2 weeks she crammed in as many faucet lessons at Broadway Dance Heart as she may earlier than her second probability on the function.
The remainder is historical past, and the efficiency she delivers is an excellent hat trick: a disarmingly human portrayal of a famously one-dimensional character. “The tough half about her,” Rogers says of Betty, “is combining the larger-than-life vitality of a cartoon with an actual individual.” Her standout 11 o’clock quantity, “One thing to Shout About,” a towering David Foster Ballad, brings down the home.
Rogers describes herself as bubbly and larger-than-life, which made constructing Betty a pure course of. “There’s lots of her that additionally belongs to Jasmine.”
And she or he relished recreating Betty’s signature hour-glass look with costume designer Gregg Barnes, who can be up for a Tony. “I’m in a corset the entire present; it’s nice and horrible on the similar time. However the form it creates is so lovely, I wouldn’t really feel like her with out it.” For Betty’s iconic bob and curls, Rogers and hair stylist Sabana Majeed seemed to Dorothy Dandridge and different previous Hollywood references to make it recognizable however elevated.
